A technician at NBC News hit the wrong button last night, sending out a false report that Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio had died.

The network flashed the report in a news crawl – visible to viewers at the bottom of their screens – at about 7:30 p.m., during the “Dateline” broadcast.

“This is an NBC News Special Report,” the crawl said. “Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio has died at his Florida home. He was 84 years old and had …”

The message was then cut off.

Media outlets began scrambling to check what would have been blockbuster news. Minutes later, however, The Associated Press said NBC might have jumped the gun.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, NBC, in another news crawl, said its previous report was wrong.

Dom DiMaggio, Joe D’s brother, was furious at NBC.

“I don’t know what the press is coming to if they can do things like this,” he told The Post.

NBC spokesman Cory Shields said the network regrets the error, which he blamed on a “technician in the master control area.”

“It was corrected as quickly as possible,” Shields said. “Someone pressed a wrong button. The message was loaded and put on standby, and it was purely an accident.

“We are trying to track down someone from the DiMaggio camp to let them know what happened and to apologize.”

Shields said he didn’t know if the technician would be disciplined.

“I can imagine the poor guy feels just terrible,” Shields said.

Arthur Richman, a vice president of the Yankees, said his home phone rang off the hook with calls from reporters across the country trying to confirm the report – which followed a day of rumors that the ailing DiMaggio was fading.

Three hours after the foul-up, Jack Nicholson, accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award during NBC’s Golden Globes telecast, called DiMaggio his boyhood idol and said the Yankee great’s “streak is still alive.”

The false report of DiMaggio’s death was the latest in a series of similar media blunders.

Last February, MSNBC briefly flashed an obituary graphic “Frank Sinatra, 1915-1998” during a report on Ol’ Blue Eyes’ latest hospitalization. The channel later apologized. Sinatra died in May.

Last June, the AP accidentally published an obituary of Bob Hope on its Web site.